WHOM TO HANG OUT WITH AND WHERE? ANALYSIS OF THE INFLUENCE OF SPATIAL SETTING ON THE CHOICE OF ACTIVITY COMPANY

Over the past decade there has been an increasing interest into to role of social interactions and social networks for activities and travel. This coincides with a growing awareness that social and recreational trips make up a considerable share of total mobility and deserve more attention in order to understand trends in mobility. Given this trend remarkably little attention has been given to the investigation of the choice of company for social and recreational activities and travel. This paper contributes to filling this gap, by presenting estimation results of models of company choice for social activities, shopping, sport and recreation and cultural activities, based on activity diary data collected in 2007 in the Netherlands. Specific attention is given to the influence of urban form and accessibility of services on company choice. The estimation results suggest that accessibility of facilities has an impact on company choice. However, the mechanisms seem to differ between activity types. For social activities, shopping and sports/recreation, it seems that better access to facilities leads to more joint activity participation, presumably because coordination between involved parties in time and space becomes easier. In other cases (social and cultural activities), close access to facilities seems to lead to a higher probability of single activity engagement, possibly since impulsive activities (usually single) are easier to implement and pooling of facilities is not necessary.